First of all, HTML and CSS is not coding, and second it won't result in a 'serviceable website' as sites need to be dynamic these days, and you won't get paid for a static website anyway. This is a bad post and the author should feel bad.
It certainly is coding in the most literal sense of writing code to be interpreted by a computer, although it's not a programming language. You are correct about that. Nevertheless, it's a great starting place for beginners.
You definitely can get paid for building static websites. Somehow I did.
This sounds logical and correct to me.
>Once you understand that, then you can move on to Javascript, Ruby, Python, or whatever else you want.